Benjamin Britten

A pupil of Frank Bridge, the prodigiously gifted Britten began composing at a very early age, with the result that he found the more traditional teaching at London's Royal College of music, where he spent three years studying composition and the piano, uninspiring and constricting. He left England for North America in 1939 but bravely decided to return to Britain while the war was still at its height, and, following the triumphant premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, settled in Aldeburgh of the Suffolk coast, where he founded what was soon to become one of the world's leading festivals. Gifted with a solid temperament, vast erudition, and extensive knowledge of the works of his contemporaries, Britten resisted the siren calls of the avant-garde and turned his back on fashionable aesthetic revolutions, preferring, instead, to speak with an independent and recognisable voice. The power of his works derives, in part, from the source of their inspiration, their consistency of style, and from his love of the great English composers such as Purcell. Inspired by the written word and by the force of his chosen message, Britten enjoyed his greatest successes in the field of vocal music, whether in the form of songs with piano and orchestra or in operas such as Billy Budd, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Owen Wingrave. His War Requiem affords further evidence of his love of the written word and his gift for setting such words to music.